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DOE OSTI2021

Added value for integrated marine energy data systems

Launched in 2019, the Portal and Repository for Information on Marine Renewable Energy (PRIMRE) provides centralized access, standardization, community building, and integration of United States (U.S.) databases, tools and codes, and other resources that cover a range of marine energy information. The PRIMRE universe contains a series of Knowledge Hubs that represent data and information on testing of marine energy devices (MHKDR); environmental effects (Tethys); engineering and technical papers (Tethys Engineering); descriptions of marine energy companies and technologies (Marine Energy Projects Database); codes and models (Marine Energy Software); and guidance on testing and measurements (Telesto). Content is added to PRIMRE by applying a set of Guidelines and Best Practices (PRIMRE Guidelines). An aggregate search across the PRIMRE site enables users to find data and information from all the PRIMRE Knowledge Hubs simultaneously, using a single entry-point (PRIMRE Search). In addition to providing access to a range of data and information on marine energy development, testing, and effects, PRIMRE allows for the development of value added products and processes that will help move the marine energy industry forward. The PRIMRE team has recently launched two key initiatives in the U.S.—Signature Projects and Lessons Learned. Outputs and outcomes from these two initiatives will be highlighted in this paper. The Signature Projects initiative is intended to bring focus to a selection of ongoing and completed marine energy projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO), and to inform the marine energy community of what investigations have been undertaken, what tools are available, and where gaps in information persist. Each Signature Project tags papers, reports, and data from large marine energy research projects, providing easy access and attention to all the output and associated products from each project. The Lessons Learned initiative is intended to ensure that hard-won achievements are recognized and available for those who come later, that missteps and unfortunate outcomes can be prevented in future, and that efficiencies and effective shortcuts can be publicized and used as the marine energy industry moves forward. This initiative builds off the Knowledge Hubs and reaches out to members of the marine energy community, particularly technology developers and researchers, to integrate experience in the development, deployment, assessment, success, and challenges while creating this new industry and field of study.

Copping, Andrea E.↗

DOE OSTI2021

Added value for integrated marine energy data systems

Copping, Andrea E.↗

DOE OSTI2022

Implementing multi-settlement decentralized electricity market design for transactive communities with imperfect communication

Recent advances in information and communication technologies and smart metering, provides strategic opportunities for ``prosumers" to reform their conventional energy practices towards more consumer-centric economies. From an operational perspective, managing power distribution networks is becoming more difficult with such active grid-edge systems providing limited to no visibility or control. Transactive Energy (TE) has been emerging as a key enabler towards effectively and efficiently integrating prosumers into competitive electricity markets. This work presents a transactive implementation of community-centric markets. A co-simulation framework is developed for evaluating the proposed market structure with high-fidelity models. Case studies on the IEEE-123 node test system demonstrate that community-centric transactive markets can enable communities of prosumers to operate collaboratively as grid-edge systems. The potential benefits of implementing community-centric TE systems are also illustrated.

Mukherjee, Monish↗

DOE OSTI2023

Standardized naming of microbiome samples in Genomes OnLine Database

The power of next-generation sequencing has resulted in an explosive growth in the number of projects aiming to understand the metagenomic diversity of complex microbial environments. The interdisciplinary nature of this microbiome research community, along with the absence of reporting standards for microbiome data and samples, poses a significant challenge for follow-up studies. Commonly used names of metagenomes and metatranscriptomes in public databases currently lack the essential information necessary to accurately describe and classify the underlying samples, which makes a comparative analysis difficult to conduct and often results in misclassified sequences in data repositories. The Genomes OnLine Database (GOLD) (https:// gold.jgi.doe.gov/) at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute has been at the forefront of addressing this challenge by developing a standardized nomenclature system for naming microbiome samples. GOLD, currently in its twenty-fifth anniversary, continues to enrich the research community with hundreds of thousands of metagenomes and metatranscriptomes with well-curated and easy-to-understand names. Through this manuscript, we describe the overall naming process that can be easily adopted by researchers worldwide. Additionally, we propose the use of this naming system as a best practice for the scientific community to facilitate better interoperability and reusability of microbiome data.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2021

Transactive Implementation of Decentralized Electricity Market for Grid-Edge Systems

The electricity landscape is evolving towards more decentralized approaches due to the proliferation of distributed energy resources and the participation of increasingly smart consumers and producers (prosumers). Recent advances in information and communication technologies and smart metering, provides strategic opportunities for “prosumers” to reform their conventional energy practices towards more consumer-centric economies. From an operational perspective, managing power distribution networks is becoming more difficult with such active grid-edge systems providing limited to no visibility or control. Transactive Energy (TE) has been emerging as a key enabler towards effectively and efficiently integrating prosumers into competitive electricity markets. This work presents a transactive implementation of community-centric markets. A co-simulation framework is developed for evaluating the proposed market structure with high-fidelity models. Case studies on the IEEE-123 node test system demonstrate that community-centric transactive markets can enable communities of prosumers to operate collaboratively as grid-edge systems. The potential benefits of implementing community-centric TE systems are also illustrated.

transactive, microgrids, centralized market operat↗

DOE OSTI2024

Achieving Cooperative Community Equitable Solar Sources (ACCESS) (Final Technical Report)

Since 2011, solar has grown from a niche technology to a widely accessible source of power for homes and businesses across the United States and has become a fundamental part of the modern grid. There are still challenges, however, in learning how to integrate and use PV most effectively and how to make PV universally available. Most low- and moderate-income (LMI) customers cannot currently afford PV; capital costs and financing costs are too high to drive significant penetration. Providing access to LMI individuals and communities is a critical and immediate priority, and the focus of this project. The overall objective of the Achieving Cooperative Community Equitable Solar Sources (ACCESS) project is to explore and amplify the use of innovative, cost-effective energy access programs to serve co-ops’ LMI members1. ACCESS will research at least three financing mechanisms and at least six LMI program designs including LMI engagement strategies to maximize participation for these hard-to-reach audiences. ACCESS evaluated the financial mechanisms and program designs from field tests sited at diverse co-ops that provide recognizable models for the broader co-op community to identify optimal solutions for small utilities. The research with these cooperatives allowed testing of concepts and development of models and tools for other utilities to adapt to their own program designs and expansions. ACCESS published results and developed an “ACCESS Solar Access Toolkit” consisting of program designs, LMI engagement strategies, how-to guidance, and other tools to facilitate replication at small utilities across the country. Through the dissemination practices of the ACCESS project team, all NRECA member co-ops (~900) were made aware of the “ACCESS Solar Access Toolkit” and all other ACCESS resources. NRECA and its partners developed innovations to expand co-ops’ solar energy offerings to provide all of a co-op’s members—especially those who struggle to pay their bills—with cost-effective options that meet their needs. ACCESS specifically explored utility financing mechanisms and program designs that, independently or used in combination, increase solar access for rural electric cooperatives’ LMI members/ratepayers and that reduce LMI member/ratepayers’ electricity costs by at least 10%. LMI engagement strategies focused on maximizing the number of members who receive benefits and on the cost savings to LMI participants.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2022

Comparison of Microbial Profiling and Tracer Testing for the Characterization of Injector-Producer Interwell Connectivities

Insufficient understanding of the microbial communities and associated microbial processes in geological reservoirs hinders the utilization of this rich data source for improved resource management. In this study, along with four interwell tracer tests at a 1478-m deep fractured crystalline-rock aquifer, we analyzed the microbial communities in the injected and produced water by high-throughput sequencing. The microbial community similarities across boreholes during an interwell flow scenario frequently encountered in reservoir development was explored. Despite the significant tracer recoveries (~30%) in all tracer tests and the cumulatively >100,000 L of exogenous water (carrying exogenous microbes) injected into the 10-m-scale reservoir, the overall structure of produced-fluid microbiome did not increasingly resemble that of the injectate. However, producers with better connectivity with the injector (based on tracer test results) did have more amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) that overlapped with those in the injectate. We identified possible drivers behind our observations and verified the practicality of repeated microbial sampling in the context of reservoir characterization and long-term monitoring. We highlight that injector-producer microbial profiling could provide insights on the relative connectivities across different producers with a given injector, and that the associated logistical needs may be comparable or even less than that of classic tracer tests.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2025

MOOSE-based Tritium Migration Analysis Program, Version 8 (TMAP8) for advanced open-source tritium transport and fuel cycle modeling

Tritium management is critical for the safety, sustainability, and economics of fusion energy systems, and advanced and reliable modeling tools help accelerate the development of tritium technologies. This paper presents the Tritium Migration Analysis Program, Version 8 (TMAP8), an open-source, MOOSE-based application developed to provide state-of-the-art tritium transport and fuel cycle modeling capabilities. TMAP8 aims to expand the capabilities of previous versions (i.e., TMAP4 and TMAP7) by leveraging modern computational techniques, ensuring high software quality assurance standards (key to building trust), and enabling multispecies, multiscale, and multiphysics simulations for integrated tritium transport modeling in complex geometries. This paper outlines TMAP8’s scope and rigorous development practices, emphasizing its transparency, accessibility, modularity, and reliability. We present the current suite of verification and validation cases based on those from TMAP4, demonstrating TMAP8’s accuracy and reliability against analytical solutions and experimental data. Additionally, the paper showcases TMAP8’s integrated fuel cycle modeling capabilities, highlighting its applicability at various scales and levels. The TMAP8 code and documentation are openly available, promoting collaborative development and widespread adoption within the fusion community. Future work will soon expand TMAP8’s verification and validation suite to include those from TMAP7 and other recent experimental studies for validation.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2026

Cyber-Informed Engineering for Strategic Planning

The CIE Guide for Engaging Organizational Leadership: Board and C-Suite describes how to apply CIE at the senior-level of organizational management. This guidance integrates CIE concepts into theory and practice of guiding coalition leadership to improve permeation of CIE concepts throughout organizational culture. This guide incorporates feedback from CIE community of practice volunteers in a study of how business administrative and strategic planning and management guidance and course materials can be applied to CIE implementation throughout an organization's principles and processes. This guide defines the interests guiding senior leadership, managers and supervisors, and technicians and workers involved in creating and operating and maintaining systems, and cultural/ historical/ political assumptions or influences shaped the landscape that could facilitate or impede development of CIE. The included guidance for organizational strategic management and leadership can be imbedded into contract guidance based on the CIE implementation guide and lessons learned from industry application.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2023

U.S. Offshore Wind Energy Noise Reduction Associated with Installation of Fixed-Bottom Foundations: Workshop Report

As offshore wind energy development grows in the United States, solutions are needed to reduce the underwater noise and substrate vibration generated during fixed-bottom turbine installation to help protect marine life. Monopiles are currently the main turbine foundation type installed globally and impact pile driving, the primary installation method, can be a major source of noise and vibration generation during wind farm construction. Opportunities exist to reduce the amount of noise and vibration produced during future offshore wind farm development. The use of alternative foundation types and installation methods, as well as innovative noise abatement technologies, would help reduce the potential detrimental effects on sensitive marine species. To explore these opportunities, the Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office, in collaboration with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, funded the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to organize, host, and facilitate a virtual workshop in December 2022. The goal of the workshop was to gather input from the offshore wind energy community on noise reduction strategies for the installation of fixed-bottom offshore wind turbines in U.S. waters across multiple regions, including the U.S. Atlantic Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and Great Lakes to inform recommendations on future research. The joint lab team convened industry representatives, subject matter experts, and regulators to discuss potential pathways to reduce noise and vibration associated with fixed-bottom turbine installation, including the practicality of using alternative foundations and installation methods, the effectiveness of noise abatement technologies, as well as research and monitoring needs. In preparation for the workshop, the team invited experts to be part of a steering committee and worked with its members to help focus activities to meet the workshop goals. Additional pre-workshop activities included developing the invitee list and workshop agenda, reviewing existing Construction and Operations Plans (COP) for proposed offshore wind projects, distributing a brief questionnaire to industry representatives, and drafting the workshop discussion questions and Mural boards. In total, 128 workshop participants provided over 600 comments in response to the 17 group discussion questions used over two workshop sessions. Overarching recommendations highlighted across themes included future investments to provide data sharing, consistency, transparency, and opportunities for sharing best available science, knowledge, and expertise. The joint lab team synthesized the comments and identified four key research and development themes that could help advance the successful implementation of noise and vibration reduction strategies (see report). This report provides an overview of the workshop goals and scope, reviews the pre-workshop activities, presents brief summaries of participant feedback, and concludes with detailed research themes and recommendations for future investments. Appendix A includes the group discussion questions, Appendix B includes the results of the COP review, and Appendix C includes the results of the industry questionnaire. Overall, there was a high level of interest and engagement in the workshop. The sessions provided an opportunity for significant exchange of information between workshop participants from across sectors. Participants identified a variety of opportunities for next steps towards the noise reduction of offshore wind turbine installation in U.S. waters, including recommendations for future investments to provide certainty in the use of new technologies associated with alternative foundation types, noise abatement systems, and efficacy monitoring.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2023

A Comprehensive Assessment Tool for Low-TRL Current Energy Converters

Along with a market-competitive levelized cost of energy, a current energy converter technology strongly benefits from an extensive consideration of socioeconomic, environmental, and regulatory factors early in the design process. As part of a technology performance level assessment, a series of assessment questions and guidance are developed and presented to evaluate an early-stage current energy technology on holistic criteria considering the entire device lifecycle. The assessment represents an accumulation of industry and research experience to date and relies on regular updates to ensure alignment with industry best-practices, regulatory requirements, and up-to-date technical understanding. A cradle-to-grave (materials, manufacturing, installation and deployment, operations and maintenance, and end-of-life) assessment of capabilities and functional requirements (i.e., high, medium, and low) performance criteria for current energy converters deployed in tidal, ocean current, and/or river applications. Key considerations related to manufacturing and installation include supply chain robustness, manufacturability and related job creation in the end-user and/or adjacent communities, and the time-to-repayment of the embodied energy debt. During deployment and maintenance operations, the safety of the device and subsystems during disconnect or grid failure, the difficulty and frequency of offshore heavy-lift activities, the avoidance or mitigation of area-use conflicts, the sea-states and weather conditions that permit maintenance access, and the availability of contingency plans (should conditions change unexpectedly) are a portion of the considered assessment criteria. Results include the potential impact of early-stage design decisions on the socioeconomic, environmental, and regulatory performance of a technology that allows developers to increase the product value and probability of success, and minimize costly late-stage design iterations through early and broad consideration of factors affecting overall performance and acceptability.

life cycle analysis↗

DOE OSTI2021

Emerging Energy Market Analysis Initiative, Methodological Framework

Planning and operations of the electric power sector are undergoing radical changes. Climate change mitigation efforts have forced rapid changes to the technology mix. Technologies like wind and solar have experienced rapid growth, while investment in fossil sources has peaked or is declining. These foundational changes are forcing changes to energy systems. Demand-side adoption of electrified technologies, including electric vehicles, is changing load profiles and opening up new avenues for consumer participation in the power systems. The implications of an evolving power system pertain to more than environmental and technical dimensions. Changes to the generation mix and its consequent upstream and downstream impacts such as fuel production have significant and highly concentrated consequences on economies and employment. Shifts towards distributed (or decentralized) generating assets offer the potential to reshape economic and employment opportunities associated with the energy sector across space and socioeconomic groups. The Emerging Energy Market Analysis (EMA) initiative aims to identify sustainable, regionally acceptable, and high-value energy solutions that are secure and equitable. Unlike short-term, least-cost choices that can narrowly account for traditional options, EMA’s focus on emerging energy markets recognizes that new or adapted practices and technologies can alter the frontier of solutions and advance a community’s social, economic, and natural pathways. Such change requires a more comprehensive analysis of societal input, resources, capabilities, and infrastructure. These considerations lay the foundation for community decision-making models that are responsive to community values as well as the history and drivers. The result is a community-based decision and engagement model that will be valuable to decisionmakers and developers of advanced and emerging energy solutions, seeking a social license to operate prior to project development.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

DOE OSTI2020

Parameterizing Perennial Bioenergy Crops in Version 5 of the Community Land Model Based on Site‐Level Observations in the Central Midwestern United States

Abstract With projected expansion of biofuel production at a global scale, there is a pressing need to develop adequate representation of bioenergy crops in land surface models to help effectively quantify the biogeophysical and biogeochemical effects of its associated land use changes. This study implements two new perennial bioenergy crops, Miscanthus and switchgrass, into the Community Land Model Version 5 based on site‐level observations from the midwestern United States by modifying parameters associated with photosynthesis, phenology, allocation, decomposition, and carbon cost of nitrogen uptake and integrating concomitantly land management practices. Sensitivity analyses indicate that carbon and energy fluxes of the perennial crops are most sensitive to photosynthesis and phenology parameters. Validation of simulated fluxes against site‐level measurements demonstrates that the model is capable of capturing the overall patterns of energy and carbon fluxes, as well as physiological transitions from leaf emergence to senescence. Compared to annual crops, perennial crops feature longer growing season, greater leaf areas, and higher productivity, leading to increased transpiration, lower annual runoff, and larger carbon uptake. The model simulations suggest that with higher CO 2 assimilation rates and lower demands for nutrients and water, high‐yielding perennial crops are promising alternatives of bioenergy feedstocks compared to traditional annual crops not only for mitigating climate change but also for environmental conservation purposes by reducing fertilizer application and therefore alleviating surface‐ and ground‐water contaminations. Although the local‐scale simulations shed light on potential benefits of using perennial grasses as bioenergy feedstocks, quantifying consequences of their plantations at larger scales warrants additional investigation.

Cheng, Yanyan↗

DOE OSTI2024

Initial Feasibility Assessment of Agrivoltaics in Jackson County, IL

Consistent with concerns raised in other rural communities, the agricultural community in Jackson County, IL is reluctant to install ground based photovoltaic (PV) systems on prime agricultural land. Agrivoltaic solutions have the potential to mitigate community concerns of conversion of farmland to solar energy by allowing for both energy production and farming practices to occur on the same land area. To assess the potential for agrivoltaics in Jackson County, IL, the Jackson County Coalition requested technical assistance to perform an initial technoeconomic assessment, resource assessment, and feasibility assessment based on the unique agricultural context present in the area. In this paper, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) interviewed five Jackson County experts for five key crops (vineyards, strawberries, pumpkins, apple and pear orchards, and hemp) to examine potential for agrivoltaics integration and identify key barriers that could hamper development. NREL performed technoeconomic analysis for different agrivoltaic system designs to determine the economic constraints and opportunities of agrivoltaics development. Overall, there is no one path for agrivoltaics success in Jackson County. Pilot projects can assist in demonstrating agrivoltaic feasibility to stakeholders reluctant to be first adopters. Based on preliminary analyses, agrivoltaic integration with vineyards may prove most feasible as the per acre returns of grapes are comparable with the returns needed to offset higher solar development costs for agrivoltaic systems. In terms of technical specifications of solar, pumpkins and strawberries could be integrated into more traditional solar designs, but there are concerns with shading and pest control. There is no one size fits all solution, and many options may need exploring before a workable solution is found.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

CMaize: Simplifying inter-package modularity from the build up

There is a growing desire for inter-package modularity within the chemistry software community to reuse encapsulated code units across a variety of software packages. Most comprehensive efforts at achieving inter-package modularity will quickly run afoul of a very practical problem, being able to cohesively build the modules. Writing and maintaining build systems has long been an issue for many scientific software packages that rely on compiled languages such as C/C++. The push for inter-package modularity compounds this issue by additionally requiring binary artifacts from disparate developers to interoperate at a binary level. Thankfully, the de facto build tool for C/C++, CMake, is more than capable of supporting the myriad of edge cases that complicate writing robust build systems. Unfortunately, writing and maintaining a robust CMake build system can be a laborious endeavor because CMake provides few abstractions to aid the developer. Further, the need to significantly simplify the process of writing robust CMake-based build systems, especially in inter-package builds, motivated us to write CMaize. In addition to describing the architecture and design of CMaize, the article also demonstrates how CMaize is used in production-level software.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

DOE OSTI2026

Framework for X-ray mirror surface shape fitting

For accurate characterization of grazing-incidence X-ray mirrors, we present a comprehensive framework to fit measured surface shapes (either slope or height) of X-ray mirrors used in synchrotron radiation and free-electron laser facilities. We summarize the closed-form expressions of some typical surface shapes of X-ray mirrors including elliptic cylinders, hyperbolic cylinders, ellipsoids, hyperboloids, and diaboloids. This framework is composed of four layers: definition of standard shapes with closed-form expressions, generation of theoretical surface with pose parameters (six degrees of freedom defining an object's position and orientation relative to a coordinate system), parameter optimization with the ability to select which parameters are fit and which are held constant, and the development of user-friendly fitting function wrappers for particular fitting tasks. A few practical fitting examples are demonstrated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed fitting framework. We discuss the physical meanings of the fitting parameters, and provide several examples using the elliptic cylinder and ellipsoid shapes to highlight some features of the framework. Moreover, we provide the presented framework as open-source codes (MATLAB and Python codes available at https://github.com/nsls2omf/xmf) to the community to encourage academic collaboration and further improvements.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2023

Are System Baselines within OT Environments Feasible?

Critical infrastructure stakeholders need to baseline their systems to understand expected protocol communications.Baseline behaviors may vary based on operational context.Expected operations during a maintenance window, for example, may be different from normal operations.Furthermore, constructing system baselines for Industrial Control Systems (ICS) is difficult and time-consuming.ICS processes generate artifacts expressed across heterogeneous data sources such as network and device logs. There needs to be a corpus of data in order to develop and compare methods that evaluate the feasibility, performance, and generality of approaches to construct baselines for ICS events. Standalone repositories of network packet captures are insufficient to develop methods to classify or recognize operational events expressed across multiple data sources. Moreover, static data corpora do not enable researchers to compare the impact of changing the underlying system for which a baseline is being constructed and this limits the ability to evaluate the performance of system baselines given system changes (e.g. patches, configuration, maintenance events). In order to address these limitations within the community, this talk intends to promote discussion about the state of the practice of constructing baselines. In this manner, we can continue to understand requirements within industry that are not being met by current approaches to baseline construction. This talk builds on two previous talks on the topic of system baselines for OT environments. First, Weaver co-presented at the RSA Conference ICS Sandbox with Dan Gunter. The talk confirmed the need within industry to construct baselines across multiple types of data sources relative to the semantics of specific business processes. Second, Weaver presented at IEEE Security and Privacy Workshop on Language-Theoretic Security.

02 PETROLEUM↗

DOE OSTI2024

Hot Springs and Geysers: Exploring Historical and Modern Impacts of Geothermal Energy Production on Associated Natural Surface Systems and Standardizing Management Practices

Surface thermal features, most notably hot springs and geysers are increasingly being recognized for their importance to ecosystems, indigenous cultures, and in some cases agriculture, recreation, and tourism. Geothermal project development poses a potential risk to these natural features but current regulatory requirements for assessing and managing these risks during exploration, permitting and monitoring are somewhat inconsistent and unpredictable across different geothermal fields. This has resulted in uncertainty and increases in exploration risk for geothermal energy developers that have led to costly project delays, cancellations, or hesitation to commit. Varying regulatory requirements may also influence public perception, fostering confusion, distrust and ultimately opposition to geothermal projects, further contributing to project delays or cancellations. At a time when there is an increasing urgency for reliable baseload clean energy, geothermal is a net-zero, renewable solution that additionally provides access to more equitable and environmentally just clean power. Continued integration of geothermal energy into the national energy roadmap can be facilitated through consistent and predictable permitting, providing regulators the framework they need, developers a clear path forward, and transparency that the public deserves. This project, currently in its beginning phases, seeks to address this important issue by providing a technical basis from which to build a preliminary protocol for assessing and managing potential impacts from new or existing geothermal energy projects to surface thermal features and their associated ecosystems. Development of this preliminary protocol will be informed by (1) a literature review of well-documented case studies in the western U.S. and New Zealand to understand the range of conditions that exemplify geothermal-surface thermal systems; (2) development of generic illustrative conceptual-numerical models to quantify, understand, and predict the first-order controls (e.g., pressure and permeability) on surface flows; and (3) additional independent and scientifically rigorous evaluations of geothermal-surface thermal system case studies from the Basin and Range Province that incorporate publicly available data as well as data provided by industry through data-sharing agreements. Learning from the successes of the process used to develop the Induced Seismicity Management Protocol (ISMP), we ultimately aim to use these initial efforts as a springboard for establishing a surface thermal feature management working group that will work collaboratively to finalize the protocol as well as co-create recommended best practices for implementation. We envision that the working group will primarily be composed of representatives from regulatory entities, government agencies, Tribes, academia, national laboratories, and industry, and will include early and regular engagement with community organizations and environmental groups. This will help ensure broad acceptance and implementation of the protocol, which will facilitate a more consistent, predictable, and standardized regulatory process, and help to ensure that geothermal energy continues to provide a reliable source of clean energy, and a pathway to achieving greater energy equity in the U.S.

Best Practices↗